The Resurgence of SPARC/Solaris

As we begin the new year, I want to wish you good health and success. I also want to re-emphasize our 100 percent commitment to the SPARC/Solaris platform.

While SPARC doesn’t make front page news these days, our loyal customers quietly continue to choose SPARC/Solaris—primarily for its notable price-performance and reliability. And many of these customers have told us they want to maintain their legacy, mission-critical applications on the SPARC platform for many years to come.

Why Do Customers Prefer Fujitsu?

Last year, we had some big wins in hospitality, energy, government, and pharmaceuticals, to name a few. Our SPARC business is also strong outside of the U.S. with new and repeat customers in Japan, Korea, Germany, and Spain.

Our customers are very excited about Fujitsu’s newest SPARC servers because they provide several unique advantages not found on other SPARC platforms.

For example, a U.S.-based clinical research firm recently completed a server refresh that resulted in substantial cost savings. Not only were they able to reduce the number of servers (consolidating from over a dozen to three) to significantly lower energy and support costs, but the reduction in cores required to run the applications yielded huge savings. These savings are due to Fujitsu’s powerful cores and its software license factor of 0.5, which means that the cost of each software license is 50 percent less. As a result, the company found that the cost savings in the first year were 3X greater than the total cost of the new servers and associated professional services.

The other main reason customers choose Fujitsu is because onlyFujitsu allows customers to upgrade to faster, more efficient servers and stay on Solaris 10, as well as older versions of Java. This is important to many customers because they want to retain the investments they’ve made in older applications and avoid the disruptive change involved with moving to Solaris 11. And this becomes even more important if the customers’ current ISV applications are not yet re-qualified for Solaris 11.x.

Long live SPARC and Solaris!

We remain committed to continued SPARC system innovation as you can see in our roadmap. I encourage you to bookmark this page for future updates. And Oracle’s official support for Solaris will continue until at least 2034, so customers can be assured of a long-lived future.

We’d love to share regular updates and news with you this year. We hope you will attend Oracle’s upcoming SPARC/Solaris roadshow in 2019. The first event will be held on January 24th in New York City where you can learn more about Solaris 11.4 and Oracle SPARC & Fujitsu SPARC systems.

We look forward to working with you in 2019 and contributing to your success. We wish you a prosperous and happy new year!